Water rate increases likely for Moses Lake residents

MOSES LAKE — Moses Lake water users could see a yearly increase in their water rates over the next seven to eight years as city officials work to save money for a series of water projects. Jessica Cole, the city’s utility services manager, said city officials have a lot to do. 

“We have a long list of improvements and a lot of deferred maintenance that's occurred over the years, and the time has come to reevaluate. We really need to make some difficult decisions on how we're going to move forward with the water resource,” Cole said. 

Moses Lake Finance Director Madeline Prentice said Moses Lake City Council members are still in the process of deciding how they want to allocate rate increases. Part of making that decision will be the results of a cost-of-service study done in October 2025. 

“We directed the consultant to determine cost-of-service to provide water to our customers. That was the first thing, because we hadn't done that for four or five years,” Prentice said. 

The goal is to get each rate class paying what it costs to provide water service to them, or at least within 10% above or below the cost of service. Multi-family housing and commercial-industrial customers are within those parameters, but single-family residences, duplexes and irrigation customers aren’t, according to information from FCS, the consultants that conducted the study.  

Rates for single-family residences are under the cost of providing service, while duplexes and irrigation customers are paying rates above the cost of service. 

Cole said the irrigation class is mostly organizations with a lot of property. 

“It's a separate irrigation meter, but it's still pulling from the same potable water supply as a domestic meter,” Cole said. “Because of the tiered rates that we established a couple of years ago, irrigation is overpaying for the water they're (using). They're subsidizing some of these other (classes), basically. What our council asked is, they wanted to see the (irrigation class rate) come down. But the thing you have to realize is that you push this one down, everybody else goes up. It has to go up in some way because we still have to bring in enough revenue to support operations, maintenance and capital improvements that we need to get done.” 

The proposed rate increases, which are still subject to change, are lower than originally forecast, since city officials decided to delay some water projects past 2034. The city is considering issuing about $11 million in debt in 2027 to pay for capital projects that year and in 2028. Moses Lake received a $2 million appropriation from the federal government, scheduled to be available in 2027. 

“We’ve got some capital items that are not expected to hit until 2032-33,” Prentice said. 

City officials are looking for alternative sources of water, since the aquifer the city relies on is running low.  

“The city is actively working on long-term source strategies, and right now we're in the early stages of planning and engineering, estimating costs on some of those,” Cole said.  “These steps may lead to realigning some of the project funding.”